Total Solar Eclipse!

Total Solar Eclipse (August 21, 2017)

Last year, Monday, August 21, the continental United States enjoyed its first total solar eclipse since February 26, 1979. It was also the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years. A number of websites carried helpful information about where to go, what you can see, etc. With “The Great American Eclipse” now history, we are looking forward to the next one to cross the Continental United States, almost exactly six years away on April 8, 2024.

Brian Cudnik went to Casper, Wyoming to watch and image the event. Some of the images are provided below. All images were recorded by Mr. Cudnik except for the totality/diamond ring image (bottom center) which is courtesy of Steve Goldberg.

The highest resolution images (very likely) ever captured of a total solar eclipse can be viewed from this HDR astrophotography website. And the detail is extraordinary! One can see craters on the moon (the tiny bright dots) as well as other lunar surface features; lots of fine detail in the corona, prominences (the pink objects) at high definition; and many stars in the background. This site not only has images of totality but high resolution images of the partial phase and animations showing changes in sunspots and corona during the eclipse.

Partial Solar Eclipse (October 23, 2014)

Images from our October eclipse viewing event are shown below, to include the small setup we used to videotape the eclipse at various times; students enjoying the show, along with Physics Faculty; and for anyone who prefers a direct view through the eyepiece, they were treated to the view that is shown in the last image. All images courtesy of Dr. Premkumar Saganti.

Check out more images from the event at this link. You can also check out some of the archived Spaceweather.com pages, such as this one from the day after the eclipse. To view a few additional images you can change the date to the 25th or 26th. Unfortunately the “Realtime Eclipse Photo Gallery” contains ALL the submitted photos organized by date, and the ones from 2014 are too far back in the gallery. One may register (for free) to be able to search the images by date or topic.